A Turkish Wanderer in London

In this reflective essay, Emre Aracı retraces his footsteps through the streets of London, uncovering traces of Turkish presence woven into the city’s cultural and musical fabric. Drawing upon his 2022 book "Londra’da Türk İzleri" (A Turkish Wanderer in London), Aracı guides readers from Leicester Square to Queen’s Hall, the Savoy Hotel, and beyond—where Ottoman diplomats mingled with Edwardian society and echoes of Istanbul appeared in the London mist. Woven with anecdotes, literary quotations, and personal memories, this journey becomes both a tribute to shared histories and an invitation to rediscover London through a uniquely Turkish lens.

Readers of Andante will doubtless find the themes explored in my recent book A Turkish Wanderer in London [Londra'da Türk İzleri], published in Turkish by Oğlak Yayınları in March 2022, already familiar, for many of the chapters first took shape within the pages of this very magazine. Indeed, this long-cherished project, years in the imagining, owes its genesis to the articles I have written for Andante, where the seeds of the book were first sown and gradually matured.

Yet the notion of accompanying my readers—like an imaginary flâneur—on a wander through the streets of London, tracing the vestiges of Turkish culture amidst the urban tapestry, has long been a vision quietly forming in my mind.

Emre Aracı's 2022 book "Londra'da Türk İzleri", (Oğlak Yayınları)

To lead them to those rare junctures where the great capitals of London and Istanbul seem to touch, aided by images and anecdotes, was a personal desire I have at last realised in book form. The idea is hardly new. The great poet and diplomat Abdülhak Hâmid Tarhan, who spent many years in London, reflected on such intersections in his memoirs. Of Leicester Square, he wrote: “In that modest, gardened square known as Leicester Square, there stands a statue of Shakespeare, its hue tending towards a sombrous black. At nightfall, the square is bathed in a certain twilight. From that statue, it seemed, one could hear an echo of the spirit of that poet of the universe: ‘There is no darkness but ignorance’. It was in contemplation of this that I wandered through the shadowed recesses of mankind”, (İnci Enginün, Abdülhak Hâmid’in Hatıraları, Dergâh Yayınları, Istanbul, 2012).

Leicester Square by night, with the statue of Shakespeare (© Emre ARACI)

Reading these lines, I was once again struck by the significance of dispelling the darkness born of ignorance in the realm of intercultural relations—and how vital a role the arts and music play in that endeavour. Shakespeare’s statue, erected in 1874, still stands in Leicester Square, silently imparting its message to those who care to listen, and, as one retraces Abdülhak Hâmid’s footsteps in pursuit of Turkish traces, it presents itself—perhaps unexpectedly—as a starting point in the very heart of the city. Moreover, Shakespeare’s words call to mind another of his lines from Twelfth Night: “If music be the food of love, play on”. It seems only fitting, then, that a book on London by a music historian should, almost unavoidably, take the shape of a soundscape—a travelogue where music, more often than not, assumes centre stage.

Abdülhak Hâmid Tarhan

According to Forty Years of Diplomatic Memoirs by the diplomat Esat Cemal Paker, who served at the Ottoman Embassy in London in 1901, Abdülhak Hâmid was, at heart, not especially fond of music. On one occasion, he asked Esat Cemal, “There is a concert at Queen’s Hall this evening. My son Hüseyin and his wife are going—would you care to join us?”. And so they all attended the concert together that evening. However, in recounting the episode, Esat Cemal could not resist adding the following observation: “The night he invited me, Hâmid was, in fact, attending a concert for the first time, persuaded by his son. Victor Hugo once described music as ‘a pleasing noise to the ear’. Hâmid, too, cared little for instrumental sound. Throughout my long tenure in London, I neither saw nor heard of him attending another concert”, (Esat Cemal Paker, Kırk Yıllık Hariciye Hatıraları, Hilmi Kitabevi, Istanbul, 1952).

Queen’s Hall—once among London’s most distinguished concert venues—was, tragically, destroyed in the German air raids on 10 May 1941 during the Second World War. As I have reflected elsewhere, in an article for Andante that drew upon quotations from E. M. Forster’s Howards End, the Queen’s Hall has often figured in my writings as a symbol of a vanished cultural world. Indeed, Francesco della Sudda—the son of Faik Pasha, one of Franz Liszt’s pupils in Constantinople—was among those who performed there. Yet until I came upon Esat Cemal Paker’s memoirs, I had no idea that Abdülhak Hâmid had ever attended a concert at Queen’s Hall, even once. Anecdotes such as this, I believe, bring us closer to the inner histories of cities that might otherwise remain strangers to us—and I do not hesitate to affirm their value in illuminating the shared pasts we have yet fully to uncover.

Supper at the Savoy

In Esat Cemal’s memoirs, it is not only Queen’s Hall that receives mention; there is also a charming anecdote concerning London’s Covent Garden Opera. The person who first introduced him to the city’s famed Royal Opera House was none other than Recai Efendi, the embassy’s imam. On that particular evening, Recai Efendi had also invited to the opera a certain Lady Bartelet—a woman of aristocratic bearing—and her daughters, after which the entire party proceeded to dine at the Savoy Hotel. In his memoirs, Esat Cemal describes Recai Efendi of Kemah as “a man of noble spirit,” and paints the following portrait: “He had a pointed beard and bore a striking resemblance to Abdülhak Hâmid—a most agreeable gentleman and immaculately dressed. He wore garments tailored by Pool, the finest clothier in London, never seen without his top hat, and in manner and appearance resembled more a diplomatic attaché than an imam”. As I read these lines, I am reminded of a postcard entitled Supper at the Savoy, which I came across while researching this book in a second-hand bookshop and have included in its pages. I find myself picturing Imam Recai Efendi, alongside Esat Cemal and their companions, seated at table at the Savoy following an evening at Covent Garden.

When Falih Rıfkı Atay visited London in 1933, he too passed through the doors of the Savoy. In Taymis Kıyıları, his travelogue of England published the following year, he wrote: “Nature here is as abundant as the air we breathe. The branches of trees brush the drawing-room windows of the Savoy Hotel, even on one of the city’s most congested thoroughfares. I heard a saying in England: ‘If a tree is planted before a road, the road shall bend’. The more I beheld London’s love of green, the more I thought of Istanbul, ever eager to push back the sea”.

The original façade of the Savoy Theatre

The Savoy opened its doors on 6 August 1889, the vision of the celebrated impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte, who built it with the profits earned from his productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operas. It was he who appointed César Ritz—later the founder of the Ritz hotels—as its manager, and who, together with the legendary chef Auguste Escoffier, established the Savoy as a world-renowned institution. The hotel would later host such luminaries as Gershwin, Puccini, and the tenor Enrico Caruso. Adjacent to the hotel stood the Savoy Theatre, opened in 1881 and reputed to be the first theatre in the world to be lit entirely by electricity—another brainchild of D’Oyly Carte. The Savoy Hotel was subsequently constructed beside it, as part of his ever-expanding cultural vision. There was even a Turkish bath bearing the Savoy name. Located on the Strand, the Savoy Hammam was one of several Turkish baths that could be found throughout London—a fascinating, if often forgotten, reminder of the city’s many-layered cosmopolitan past.

One day, as I walked eastward along the Strand, passing by the Savoy Hotel and the historic chapel nearby, my thoughts turned to Virginia Woolf and her first novel, The Voyage Out, published in 1915. It was not without reason. While crossing the old Waterloo Bridge, which once stood near here, Woolf seemed to glimpse the mist of Istanbul—where she had travelled in 1906 and again in 1910—within the haze of Westminster’s skyline. In her novel, she rendered the moment thus: “Someone is always looking into the river near Waterloo Bridge; a couple will stand there talking for half an hour on a fine afternoon; most people, walking for pleasure, contemplate for three minutes; when, having compared the occasion with other occasions, or made some sentence, they pass on. Sometimes the flats and churches and hotels of Westminster are like the outlines of Constantinople in a mist; sometimes the river is an opulent purple, sometimes mud-coloured, sometimes sparkling blue like the sea”, (Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out). 

"The flats and churches and hotels of Westminster are like the outlines of Constantinople in a mist"

It was also in London, on a June morning in 1923, that Mrs Dalloway, setting out to buy flowers for the party she would host that evening, would briefly recall Istanbul. As the chimes of Big Ben—symbol of tradition and time—marked the novel’s rhythmic passage, I too was transported to my childhood in Istanbul, remembering how I once heard that very sound through the shortwave broadcasts of the BBC World Service.

Ahmet Ihsan Bey

While on the subject of London and its mists, I am reminded of a passage quoted in the preface to this book. When Ahmet Ihsan Bey—founder and publisher of Servet-i Fünun magazine—first set foot in London during a European tour in July 1891, he wrote: “A sense of gloom reigned everywhere”. Wandering through the city’s soot-blackened, smoke-laden streets, he felt his spirit darken in kind. A week later, as he departed the British Isles by ship, he noted in his diary: “Let them keep their arts, and their commerce too! For eight days I have felt nothing but heaviness in my heart”. And upon returning to continental Europe, he rejoiced: “Praise be to God! There exists a land with sunlight and bright vistas!”, (Ahmet İhsan, Avrupa'da ne Gördüm, Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2007).

Yet nearly a century after Ahmet Ihsan’s visit, I would undertake a similar journey—though under very different circumstances. In the summer of 1977, I travelled by car from Istanbul with my family, a child of just eight years old. And unlike that disheartened writer whose name I had not yet heard, nor whose memoirs I had yet encountered, I found myself captivated by London. The pealing of bells, the double-decker red buses, the iconic telephone boxes and post pillars, the lush green parks, the palaces, and the Gothic grandeur of the Houses of Parliament—all these left a deep impression on me. As we departed the island by ferry from Dover to Calais, I felt a distinct sense of longing, as though something had been left behind. So profound was the effect of that journey that, only ten years later, I would return to London—this time in the autumn of 1987, to pursue my studies. I established my own home there, and from that day forward, I never truly left the British Isles again.

In those early years after settling in London, I began to explore the city's streets and avenues on long, meandering walks. From the very outset, I realised that I was embarking on a journey whose end I could not foresee—a journey not confined to maps, but one that sought the soul of the city itself, guided by the books of those writers who had once breathed life and voice into its vibrant fabric. I soon found myself collecting every book, document, photograph, and engraving I could find relating to London. Yet what I had not yet perceived, at that stage, was how this foreign city was, paradoxically, leading me back towards the very culture from which I had come.

Continuing my walk along the Strand, I arrive before Bush House—the former home of the BBC World Service. In our family home in Istanbul, we would listen to that crackling radio, and after the chimes of Big Ben had rung out, we would hear, in a sonorous and quintessentially BBC English accent, the announcement: “This is London”. What followed was a short musical phrase that I always found delightful. Only much later did I learn that the melody was in fact an Irish jig known as Lilliburlero, and that it had served as the BBC World Service’s interval signal since 21 November 1955. The tune was first published in London in 1661 in a collection entitled An Antidote Against Melancholy, and was later arranged by the composer Henry Purcell. How fitting, then, that five years after stepping away from performance, I should return to the London stage on the evening of Wednesday 20 April 2022 at Conway Hall, opening a Turkish-British concert with the Chamber Ensemble of London with none other than Purcell’s Fairy Queen Suite.

When Lilliburlero was first heard in London in 1661, the Levant Company was still active and the earliest Turkish coffeehouses were just beginning to appear. It had been barely sixty years since Shakespeare had written Twelfth Night, and how right he was to write: “If music be the food of love, play on”. May you, too, explore the streets and squares, the parks and museums of London in the company of the sounds and echoes that fill the pages of this book...

Emre Aracı’s article was originally published in Turkish under the title ‘Londra’da Türk İzleri’ in the May 2022 issue (No. 187) of Andante.

Link to the original article in Turkish

https://www.oglak.com/kitap/3601/Oglak-Edebiyat/Londra%E2%80%99da-Turk-Izleri/

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